dangerous ghost of their victim. When any bad man died, the Esquimaux of Bering Strait used to cut the sinews of his arms and legs, “in order to prevent the shade from returning to the body and causing it to walk at night as a ghoul.”(797) In Travancore the ghosts of men who have been hanged for murder are particularly dreaded; so in order to incapacitate them from roaming about and attacking people, it used to be customary to slice off a criminal’s heels with a sword or hamstring him at the moment when he swung free from the ladder.(798) The Omaha Indians used to slit the soles of a man who had been killed by lightning in order to prevent his ghost from walking.(799) Among the Awemba of Northern Rhodesia murderers often inflicted shocking mutilations on the bodies of their victims. “This was done, it is said, to prevent the spirit of the murdered person from exacting vengeance, and even if only the joint of the first or the little finger were cut off, such mutilation would suffice for this purpose.”(800) These examples suggest that many other mutilations which savages practise on their dead enemies may spring, not from the blind fury of hatred, but from a cool calculation of the best mode of protecting themselves against the very natural resentment of the ghosts; by mutilating the corpse they apparently hope to maim the ghost and so to render him incapable of harming them. At all events it appears that in certain circumstances some savages treat the dead bodies of men and beasts much alike, by hamstringing them in order to prevent their ghosts from getting up and walking. So consistent and impartial is the primitive philosopher in his attitude to the spirit world. CHAPTER XV. THE PROPITIATION OF VERMIN BY FARMERS. § 1. The Enemies of the Crops.